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ST. GEORGE -- A Utah artist has drawn national attention lately, without being very well-known in Utah. His statue of a little girl was unveiled recently to an audience of some of the most powerful players in Washington.
Perhaps you remember national publicity last month when Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and John Boehner unveiled a statue of Helen Keller. It was an Alabama project for the U.S. Capitol, and was created by Utah artist Edward Hlavka
Hlavka has been sculpting since he was 8--the last 12 years in the St. George area. Some of his work is offered for sale at an art gallery in Ivins.
Hlavka was as surprised as anyone when the Alabama Governor's Office reached all the way to Utah for a statue of Alabama native Helen Keller; he was one of 45 sculptors who submitted a proposal.
"First Lady Patsy Riley, of Alabama, she mentioned that I happened to be the only sculptor that submitted Helen as a child," Hlavka said.
Now that his vision is solidified in bronze in the U.S. Capitol, his idea seems obvious. He shows the blind and deaf girl at the turning point of her life--at the water pump where she began to understand language.
"The pose that I chose is right at the moment she's reaching and feeling the water," Hlavka said. "It's the 'moment of epiphany,' as they call it, when she realized, at that moment, that water had a symbol, a sign, and it had a sound. So, her life changed at that second in time."
Hlavka has a growing gallery of lifelike portraits in bronze -- some of them on a monumental scale.
A 20-foot-high version of Hlavka's "Partners in Peace" now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
He also created running horses in clay. They're now upscaled into larger-than-life mustangs, recently installed in a traffic circle near St. George, freezing into bronze some of Hlavka's favorite elements: speed, action and realism.
Hlavka's Smithsonian statue is seen by more than 1 million visitors a year. The new one of Helen Keller could be seen by well over 2 million a year, and it's already drawing special interest as the only statue of a child in Statuary Hall.
E-mail: jhollenhorst@ksl.com
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